Architecture : $b nineteenth and twentieth centuriesHitchcock, Henry-Russell
History
Architecture : $b nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell
Architecture, Modern -- 19th century; Architecture, Modern -- 20th century
While Soane’s work at the Bank was proceeding, in these years before and
after 1800, James Wyatt (1746-1813), capable of producing at Dodington
House in 1798-1808 a quite conventional example of Romantic Classicism,
was building in the years between 1796 and his death in 1813 for that
great Romantic William Beckford the largest of ‘Gothick’ garden
fabricks, Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire.[18] This was a landmark in the
rise of the Gothic Revival. In 1803 S. P. Cockerell (1754-1827),
otherwise far more consistently Classical than Wyatt, was erecting for
his brother, the Indian nabob Sir Charles Cockerell, a vast mansion in
Gloucestershire in an Indian mode. The design of Sezincote was based on
early sketches made by the landscape gardener Humphry Repton (1752-1818)
and all its details were derived from the drawings Thomas Daniell
(1749-1840) had made in India fifteen years before and published in _The
Antiquities of India_ in 1800. The ‘Indian Revival’ (so to call it) had
little success; in these years only the stables built in 1805 by William
Porden (_c._ 1755-1822) for the Royal Pavilion at Brighton followed
Sezincote’s lead.
The Neo-Gothic of Fonthill, however, a mode that had roots extending
back into the second quarter of the eighteenth century, is illustrated
in a profusion of examples by Wyatt, Porden, and many others. None,
however, seems to have succeeded as well as Beckford and Wyatt at
Fonthill in achieving the ‘Sublime’ by mere dimension. The
characteristic Gothic country houses of this period were likely to be
elaborately Tudor, like Wyatt’s Ashridge begun in 1808 and Porden’s
Eaton Hall of 1803-12, or lumpily Castellated like Hawarden of 1804-9 by
Thomas Cundy I (1765-1825) and Eastnor of 1808-15 by Sir Robert Smirke
(1781-1867). The last, moreover, differs very little from Adam’s Culzean
of 1777-90.
Some Gothic churches were built in these decades, too, as others had
been ever since the 1750s. Such an example as Porden’s church at
Eccleston of 1809-13, while more recognizably Perpendicular, lacked the
brittle charm of the earlier ‘Gothick’ churches of the eighteenth
century.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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